It is well known that the manufacture of semiconductor electronic components involves a number of steps, including but not limited to, masking, implanting, depositing, planarizing, and etching.
Advances in semiconductor manufacturing processes, and in digital systems architectures, have resulted in vast increases in computational power and similarly large decreases in prices for electronic products. The capabilities offered by this combination of high performance and low cost have driven semiconductor components into a wide array of consumer electronics products.
While many suppliers of consumer electronics products have benefited from the increased volume of product shipments, the semiconductor manufacturers have realized that serving the consumer market places tight constraints on the cost of producing the semiconductor components that are incorporated into such consumer electronics products.
What is needed are methods for reducing the costs of manufacturing semiconductor components and microelectromechanical systems.